Language, Literature, Deconstruction and Politics

Abstract

The writers discussed in this chapter, widely different though their work is, have one major feature in common — their central preoccupation with language. This is an important concern of all the thinkers mentioned in this study, but with each chapter thus far it has become more and more central. Debray, Sartre, the various Marxist philosophers all in different ways take ‘society’ (or aspects of it) as their area of exploration, and language for them is often, though not always, seen as the means to this end. (Sartre’s renunciation of fiction in favour of more militant political involvement can be read as a deliberate ‘acting-out’ of this view.) For Lacan, the relationship between language and his object of study, the processes of the human psyche, is more complex, for one can quite literally not be said to exist without the other. The distinction between ‘means’ and ‘area’ of exploration comes to seem as untenable as that once staunchly upheld between ‘form’ and ‘content’ in literature. Irigaray, Foucault, Cixous, Deleuze all take as their object of study the relationships between power and language, so that in their work the political and the linguistic (not without friction or ambiguity) coalesce. Tel Quel articulated this coalescence in a prescriptive (sometimes autocratic) way; it is explored, as briefly mentioned in the last chapter, by one of their principal contributors, Julia Kristeva.